Why did Rice, elegantly attired in a red batik dress, choose a somber Brahms piece for the ASEAN show? After all, last year her deputy, Robert Zoellick, sang “My Darling Clementine” wearing jeans and a bandanna. Well, Rice told reporters, she was preoccupied with Lebanon and wanted something to match her “serious mood.” Perhaps it was also because, as Rice likes to quote her former accompanist, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as saying, Brahms’s music has a “tension that is never resolved.”
That pretty much describes the Mideast itself. Now Condi Rice will try to do just that–solve the unsolvable. After a year and a half in which she has been lauded for her diplomacy, Rice found herself criticized last week, even by allies, for seeming to avoid diplomacy. She heard herself ridiculed for suggesting the world was witnessing “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” when what most people were seeing on their TV screens was death. Since the start of George W. Bush’s second term, Rice had prodded and cajoled her boss into a more multilateral way of thinking. Now all her careful bridge-building seemed in danger of going up in smoke, along with Lebanon and Bush’s whole Mideast-reform project.
Rice had a particularly tough time at a Rome meeting of the “Lebanon core group” countries just before she left for Malaysia. She had to listen, grim-faced, while Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora passionately called for a ceasefire to help his besieged people–with everyone in the audience knowing that she was the main obstacle. Even the few countries that she and Bush had pointed to as supporters, like Saudi Arabia, were now bitterly criticizing Israel’s part in the war. And the Saudis were incensed that Washington publicized their initial statement blaming Hizbullah, using Riyadh to legitimize Israel’s air campaign.
Now Rice wants to make up for lost time, and maybe repair her image along with the Mideast. She was stunned and hurt, says a European official who asked not to be identified, when she was perceived as coldhearted in the face of Siniora’s plea. And Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have put her in charge of negotiating an enormously complex deal, one with moving parts that span the globe. At the United Nations this week, Rice must at once orchestrate a swift U.N. Security Council resolution and quickly pull together an international force from countries reluctant to expose their soldiers to Hizbullah or Israeli munitions. In the Mideast, she must find a diplomatic solution that satisfies the Israelis and Hizbullah enough to get them to stop shooting, while measuring up to Bush’s vision of a politically reformed Mideast.
To do that, Rice must achieve an accord that reforms Lebanon. She must empower Siniora–the man who embarrassed her in Rome–with a multinational force robust enough to face down Hizbullah, and bring his government into a deal with Israel’s. “I’m now going to go into some fairly intense, I expect, not easy give-and-take with officials,” Rice told reporters on her way back to Jerusalem. “These are really hard and emotional decisions for both sides.” Adam Ereli, her spokesman, said she was grimly aware of the stakes. “I would describe her mood and attitude as jaw firmly set, moving ahead with steely determination,” he told NEWSWEEK. Playing Brahms well is hard, no doubt. Playing Mideast diplomacy is much, much harder.
